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Weird ways of treating the dead

Every moment is precious when death is near and it is difficult and painful to see our near or dear one facing death.
Death is truth of life. Every culture has its own ways to treat the dead body. Most common are burial and cremation. But there are different cultures where dead are dealt in weird ways!
I came across this weird ways by random surfing and it inspired me to write a blog and share this information with you all....
So get ready and prepare yourself to experience something shocking!!!!!

• Space Burial.  

 Who doesn't want to go to space? Here is a chance, if not while you are alive, then you can go space after death...... Surprised! 

In the late years of the 20th Century, it became the vogue to be “buried in space,” that is, to have a small part of the cremated remains placed into a capsule (about the size of a tube of lipstick) and launched into space using a rocket. Since 2004, there have been about 150 space burials.

This is very expensive and not commonly chosen and only one company currently specializes in this service. In most cases, the remains are fired into Earth orbit, though some have been launched into other trajectories, including to the moon, Pluto, and deep space. Famous people who have been “buried” in space include James Doohan (“Scotty” of Star Trek fame), Gene Roddenberry (creator of the aforementioned Star Trek), Timothy Leary (American writer, psychologist, and drug campaigner), Clyde Tombaugh (American astronomer and discoverer of Pluto), Dr. Eugene Shoemaker (Astronomer and co-discoverer of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9), and Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, Jr. (American astronaut and one of the original Mercury Seven pilots).

•  Exposure.  

 This is not practiced in western world but was practiced when a person died in an isolated area and was noticed after few days. However, there are rituals where this is practiced on regular basis.

Tibetan sky burial (known as a jahtor ) is the ritual dissection of the body, which is then laid out for the animals or the elements to dispose of. Tibet is a mountainous land where the soil is too rocky to dig graves and there is a scarcity of fuel for cremation, so sky burial arose as a logical alternative.

After being sent on their way with ceremony, the remains of the deceased are toted up to a designated location, where the body is laid out (typically naked). Then the rogyapas strip the flesh from bones, limbs are hacked away and the whole is ground up and sometimes mixed with tsampa (a mixture of barley flour, tea, and yak butter or milk) and offered to the vultures (which have learned to keep watch on the traditional burial site). The rogyapas do not go about their task with somber ritual, but rather they laugh, joke and chat as in any other manual labor.

Mass burial

• Mass burial.   

Mass grave was once more common than today. When there is an epidemic outbreak or during wars its difficult to identify the body, mass burial is preferred. Locations known to harbor mass graves include The Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Soviet Union, Chechnya, Iraq and even the United States Hart Island is a potter’s field, a place intended for the burial of unknown or indigent people, for the city of New York. It is the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world and currently houses over 850,000 “residents,” dating as far back as the Civil War, and is still used even today.

•  Plastination.

As perhaps the ultimate bid for immortality, plastination is a technique used in anatomy to preserve bodies or body parts. The water and fat are replaced by certain plastics, yielding specimens that can be touched, do not smell or decay and even retain most properties of the original sample. The resultant plastinates can be manipulated and positioned as desired.

• Cryonics

Cryonics is the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals who can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. Because, in the United States, cryonics can only be legally performed on humans after they have been pronounced legally dead, procedures ideally begin within minutes of cardiac arrest and use cryoprotectants to prevent ice formation during cryopreservation. However, the idea of cryonics also includes the preservation of people after longer post-mortem delays because of the possibility that brain structures encoding memory and personality may still persist or be inferable. Whether sufficient brain information still exists for cryonics to work under some preservation conditions may be intrinsically unprovable by present knowledge. Most proponents of cryonics, therefore, see it as a speculative intervention with prospects for success that vary widely depending on circumstances.

• Mummyfication 

The Egyptians are perhaps the best-known adherents of this process (although they are far from the only ones), in which a corpse has its skin and organs preserved, by either intentional or incidental exposure to chemicals, extreme cold, very low humidity or lack of air. The oldest mummy found to date was a decapitated head that dates back to 6000 BC. The earliest Egyptian mummy dates back to about 3300 BC. The process is wel known to science.

The internal organs are removed and dried out using natron, and are then placed either in canopic jars, or else made into four packages to be reinserted into the body cavity. The brain is scrambled by means of a hook run up through the nasal cavity, then pulled out through the nose and discarded. The heart was considered to be the organ associated with intelligence and life force. The body cavity would then be washed out with spiced palm wine and filled with dry natron gum resin and vegetable matter. It was then placed in a bath of natron and left for as long as 70 days. This would dehydrate the body and better preserve the skin. The body cavity was then excavated and refilled with permanent stuffing, and, often, the viscera packages. The abdominal incision was closed, the nostrils plugged with wax, and the body anointed with oils and gum resins. The remains would then be wrapped in layers of linen bandages, between which amulets were inserted to guard the deceased from danger and evil.

• Aquamation 

Aquamation is the most environment-friendly way of disposal of human bodies. The process involves the rapid disintegration of the human body into high quality fertilizers. In comparison with cremation, about 10% of the energy is used, and all of the associated pollution is avoided.With Aquamation, an individual body is gently placed in a clean, stainless steel vessel. A combination of water flow, temperature (~90C) and alkalinity are used to accelerate the natural course of tissue hydrolysis. Typically the process takes about four hours to complete.

There are other methods like cannibalism (which exists only in our history, is humans eating humans), burial at sea,cremation, ground burial etc.

Now even after-death experience is cool...! So which method do you prefer for the disposal of your dead body?

Want to be an amputee?

Have you ever heard of a person having a burning desire to be an amputee???
Yes, You heard it right be an amputee!!!

What inspired me to write about BIID is a program in NGC- Taboo. A person from Sydney,Australia was suffering from BIID and went to extreme levels to amputate his left leg below his knees.

When there is a mismatch between the mental body image and physical body of a person, this makes the person feel that their hand/leg should not be the part of their body, it is alien and thus has a burning desire to amputate it. This neurological disorder is called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID).

 In a layman's language its, "When a person's idea of how they should look does not match their actual physical form, it can be caused by Body Integrity Identity Disorder". Strange!

This condition effects very small percentage of population and its cause is unknown it is rare, infrequently studied and highly secretive condition. The person suffering from BIID feels isolated, cannot express his feelings to anyone not even to their close or loved ones as people think they are crazy. This creates a feeling of loneliness and less social life. They generally are ashamed of their thoughts and try to hide them from others, including therapists and health care professionals.The urge can be so severe that they they may try to injure themselves that may require an amputation of that limb.

The very thought of amputation makes a normal person scare, doesn't it? But for BIID person its a pleasure of being complete.

People often confuse BIID with a similar mental illness called Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) in which sufferers become fixated on a perceived flaw in their appearance or some slight physical abnormality. In BIID there is no flaw with the limbs, its a desire to amputate their healthy, functional limb. 

Many psychologists and neurologists have ventured theories into what causes this type of thought.The most accepted theory states that it is a neuro-psychological condition on the right side of the brain and could be related to somatoparaphrenia. The common leading idea is that Body Integrity Identity Disorder, or BIID, occurs when the brain is not able to provide an accurate plan of the body.

The only treatment so far known is a surgery.

In 2000, Dr. Robert C. Smith, a surgeon from Scotland, made headlines when he amputated the healthy legs of two patients with BIID He said he was following the Hippocratic Oath by preventing his patients from resorting to more life-threatening options — but the medical community did not agree. Since then, it’s been virtually impossible for a person to find a surgeon willing to do the elective surgery, and many people with BIID have resorted to drastic and dangerous measures to induce amputation.

There are many such mental disorders which are rare, infrequently studied. The more science advances, the more nature creates challenges for it to solve.

To know more about  BIID log on to www.biid.org  and to know the story of John, BIID patient, log on to http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520811,00.html

A Living Balloon that kills!

Guys, here is a fascinating marine   - The PUFFER FISH.

Puffer fish is also known as puffers, balloonfish, blowfish, bubblefish, globefish, swellfish, toadfish, toadies, honey toads. Puffer fish are generally believed to be the second–most poisonous vertebrates in the world, after the golden poison frog.  It belongs to the family of Tetraodontidae,  
which mean 4 teeth, which helps them to hold crustaceans and mollusks, having hard shells.

Biologists think puffer fish, also known as blowfish, developed their famous “inflatability” because their slow, somewhat clumsy swimming style makes them vulnerable to predators. In lieu of escape, puffer fish use their highly elastic stomachs and the ability to quickly ingest huge amounts of water (and even air when necessary) to turn themselves into a virtually inedible ball several times their normal size. Some species also have spines on their skin to make them even less palatable.
A predator that manages to snag a puffer before it inflates won’t feel lucky for long. Almost all puffer fish contain tetrodotoxin, a substance that makes them foul tasting and often lethal to fish. To humans, tetrodotoxin is deadly, up to 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide. There is enough toxin in one puffer fish to kill 30 adult humans, and there is no known antidote.


 FUGU- A rare delicacy

 

Amazingly, the meat of some puffer fish is considered a delicacy. Called fugu in Japan, it is extremely expensive and only prepared by trained, licensed chefs who know that one bad cut means almost certain death for a customer. In fact, many such deaths occur annually.

The restaurant preparation of fugu is strictly controlled by the law in Japan and several other countries, and only chefs who have qualified through rigorous training are allowed to deal with the fish. However, the domestic preparation occasionally leads to accidental death. Fugu is served as sashimi and chirinabe. Some consider the liver the tastiest part but it is also the most poisonous, and serving this organ in restaurants was banned in Japan in 1984.Fugu has become one of the most celebrated and notorious dishes in Japanese cuisine.  The most good-looking (and the largest) Japanese restaurant has (finally) opened in Mumbai. (More about the food, service and pricing later). It is also the only restaurant serving the deadly, poisonous, celebrated, expensive 'Fugu' (Barely 20 restaurants in the US serve it and the European Union has banned it). 

It takes two years of intensive training to cook fugu!!! If anyone had watched Glutton for punishment program on TLC, they would know Bob blumer had learnt and cooked fugu in just 5 days! WOW...

 There are more than 120 species of puffer fish worldwide. Most are found in tropical and subtropical ocean waters, but some species live in brackish and even fresh water. They have long, tapered bodies with bulbous heads. Some wear wild markings and colors to advertise their toxicity, while others have more muted or cryptic coloring to blend in with their environment.

Now tell me Fish lovers, will you dare to eat fish that kills???

APITHERAPY- The bee sting therapy

Ouch! honey bee sting pains a lot.
 And what if this stings are used as an therapy to treat few diseases?

APITHERAPY, or “bee therapy” (from the Latin apis which means bee) is the medicinal use of products made by honeybees.
Proudcts of the Honeybee include bee venom, honey, pollen, royal jelly, propolis, and beeswax.

                                    Charles Marz preparing dry venom



Some of the conditions treated (not in any special order) are: multiple sclerosis, arthritis, wounds, pain, gout, shingles, burns, tendonitis, and infections.

Therapies involving the honeybee have existed for thousands of years and some may be as old as human medicine itself. The ancient rock art of early hunter-gatherers depicts the honeybee as a source of natural medicine. Bee venom therapy was practiced in ancient Egypt, Greece, and China—three Great Civilizations known for their highly developed medical systems. Hippocrates, the Greek physician known as the “Father of Medicine”, recognized the healing virtues of bee venom for treating arthritis and other joint problems. Today, growing scientific evidence suggests that various bee products promote healing by improving circulation, decreasing inflammation, and stimulating a healthy immune response.
It is important to note that Apitherapy is not only the use of the venom for healing, often called Bee Sting Therapy, but the use of all the hive products, and usually a combination of them.  These products are also sometimes mixed with other ingredients, specifically different essential oils, dependent on the condition being treated.
The more modern study of apitherapy, specifically bee venom, was initiated through the efforts of Austrian physician Philip Terc in his published results “Report about a Peculiar Connection between the Bee Stings and Rheumatism” in 1888. Bodog Beck (Budapest, Hugary 1871 – NYC, 1942) followed Terc, and brought Apitherapy to the United States.  More recent popularity has been credited to Charles Mraz (1905 – 1999), a beekeeper from Vermont, who knew Beck.  Some of the Board Members of the American Apitherapy Society, as well as some general AAS members, have been trained by and/or treated and inspired by Mraz.  The Society’s annual educational and training event, CMACC, is named for him, the Charles Mraz Apitherapy Course and Conference.
For detailed information you may also read:
Introduction to Bee Venom Therapy, by Charles Mraz
The Buzz on Bee Therapy (a 2008 article in a health Journal)

50 THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW

50 Completely Useless Facts!
One of these amazing, but useless facts is false. Do you know which one?
The word "queue" is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed. Beetles taste like apples, wasps like pine nuts, and worms  like fried bacon. Of all the words in the English language, the word 'set' has the most definitions! What is called a "French kiss" in the English speaking world is known as an "English kiss" in France. "Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order. "Rhythm" is the longest English word without a vowel. In 1386, a pig in France was executed by public hanging for the murder of a child A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off! Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete. You can't kill yourself by holding your breath There is a city called Rome on every continent. It's against the law to have a pet dog in Iceland! Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day! Horatio Nelson, one of England's most illustrious admirals was throughout his life, never able to find a cure for his sea-sickness. The skeleton of Jeremy Bentham is present at all important meetings of the University of London Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, everytime you breathe! The elephant is the only mammal  that can't jump! One quarter of the bones in your body, are in your feet! Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different! The first known transfusion of blood was performed as early as 1667, when Jean-Baptiste, transfused two pints of blood from a sheep to a young man Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails! Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin! The present population of 5 billion plus people of the world is predicted to become 15 billion by 2080. Women blink nearly twice as much as men. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and had only ONE testicle.		Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible. Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th." Coca-Cola would be green if colouring weren’t added to it. On average a hedgehog's  heart beats 300 times a minute. More people are killed each year from bees than from snakes. The average lead pencil will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words. More people are allergic to cow's milk than any other food. Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand. The placement of a donkey's eyes in its' heads enables it to see all four feet at all times! The six official languages of the United Nations are: English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. Earth is the only planet not named after a god. It's against the law to burp, or sneeze in a church in Nebraska, USA. You're born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you only have 206. Some worms will eat themselves if they can't find any food! Dolphins sleep with one eye open! It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open The worlds oldest piece of chewing gum is 9000 years old! The longest recorded flight  of a chicken is 13 seconds Queen Elizabeth I regarded herself as a paragon of cleanliness. She declared that she bathed once every three months, whether she needed it or not Slugs have 4 noses. Owls are the only birds who can see the colour blue. A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years! A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue! The average person laughs 10 times a day! An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain --------------------------------------------------- The answer is....... It's against the law to have a pet dog in Iceland!

Buddhist Self Mummification.

Guys do read this.... 

It's really scary to know what a person does to become a mummy. Which is considered sacred!!!

What Is It?
Self-mummification was practiced until the late 1800s in Japan, by people who thought being a mummy looked so awesome they couldn't wait until actual death to be one. It's been outlawed since the early 1900s, and when we describe how it works, you'll see why. Just wrapping yourself up in bandages and waiting for the Grim Reaper doesn't seem to cut it.
No, to mummify yourself properly, you'll need over 2,000 days of preparation. Here's how to do it, the Buddhist priest way:
First we've got to get all of the fat off of your body. They did this by changing their diet to just nuts and seeds. The priest could eat nothing else for 1,000 days.
Next, we need to remove as much moisture from your body as possible. Since your body is mostly moisture, this may cause you some discomfort. The priests would eat only a small amount of bark and root from pine trees, for another 1,000 days. Then they'd drink a special tea (and by "special" we mean "incredibly poisonous") made from the sap of an urushi tree.
If the tea causes explosive diarrhea and vomiting, you'll know it's working. Again, this will reduce the amount of moisture inside you, but more importantly the sap will soak into your guts, lining them and thus protecting them against maggots.
Next you'll be sealed in a small, stone room--just big enough to sit in the lotus position. You're done! Now you just have to wait to die!

Dear God, Why?
This was all tied to the Buddhist idea that to achieve enlightenment, you must separate yourself from the physical world entirely so that at death, instead of being reborn, you become one with Buddha. That's why 1,000 days after they finally keeled over in the stone room, a crowd would gather to peer inside, seeing how the mummification went. Most of the time, it didn't work.

If the priest had successfully mummified himself, he would be revered as Buddha, and presumably everyone would have a massive party to celebrate, and they'd gorge themselves on shrimp and tiny cocktail sausages. Except for those who were already well on their way to self-mummification. They'd have the nut roast.